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Yesterday, I provided a clue regarding the future of one of his significant abilities, but it appears that no one comprehended it.
Second, I am thinking of the worlds of House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones around the fifth or seventh volume. What do you think he should be? Or maybe even sooner, as by then he would be as strong as Basic Thor from Marvel. What do you think? Does the world have potential with dragons and magic, capturing his own empire there with mostly queens ruling?
*****
He gave the massacre one last look. Fifteen mummified bodies, dead in seconds. It was a grim testament to his power, and a warning of the escalation to come.
"Raccoon City is waiting," Atlas said to the wind.
He turned south. His legs coiled with explosive power.
Zap.
He broke into a run, as if the earth was playing hopscotch beneath his new boots, leaving the crows to feast on the chaos of the impending apocalypse.
---
Location: The Arklay Mountains – Sector 9 (Ambush Site).
Time: 05:42 AM.
(U.B.C.S. Bravo Team).
Twelve minutes. That was all it took for the forest to reclaim the silence.
The morning mist was thick, drifting through the towering pines like spectral fingers. The sound of rotor blades cut through the quiet as a black Umbrella transport helicopter hovered above the canopy, dropping ropes.
U.B.C.S. Bravo Team descended.
These were not fresh recruits. They were veterans of the conflicts in Eastern Europe, hardened mercenaries paid top dollar to clean up Umbrella's messes. But as their boots hit the soft, pine-needle ground of the clearing, even they hesitated.
The smell hit them first.
It wasn't just the metallic tang of fresh blood; it was the smell of opened bodies—the heavy, sweet stench of viscera exposed to the air.
"Perimeter secure," Captain Henderson whispered into his comms, his rifle raised. "Moving to contact."
He signaled his point man to advance. They moved slowly, stepping over the fern-covered ground, until they reached the kill zone.
"Jesus Christ..." the point man gagged, lowering his weapon.
The clearing was a slaughterhouse.
Fifteen men of Echo Team lay scattered like broken mummified toys. But they hadn't just been killed; they had been dismantled.
Henderson walked toward the remains of the Echo Leader. He stopped, staring down at the severed mummified head resting three feet from the neck. The expression on the dead man's face was frozen in a mask of absolute, primal terror. His eyes were wide, bulging from their sockets, staring up at a horror his brain couldn't process in his final seconds.
"Command," Henderson said, his voice trembling slightly despite his training. "We found Echo Team."
[Status?] A cold voice crackled in his earpiece.
"Wiped out," Henderson reported, looking around. "Total loss. No survivors."
He walked over to a soldier whose chest had been opened. The ceramic trauma plate—rated to stop the 7.62mm plate—was sliced clean through.
"Sir, you need to see this," Henderson said, unclipping his tactical camera and syncing it to the live feed. "The wounds... they aren't ballistic."
He focused the lens on the dried up chest wound. "Three to Six parallel lacerations," Henderson described. "Clean cuts. Through Kevlar, ceramic, and bone. It looks like they were hit by a giant blender."
He moved to another body—the sniper on the ridge.
"Blunt force trauma here. The clavicles are pulverized. It looks like something heavy dropped on him from the trees."
Henderson moved deeper into the carnage, stepping over a severed hand still clutching a grenade pin. He found the soldier who had tried to run.
"And this..." Henderson knelt, zooming the camera in.
Buried deep in the base of the soldier's mummified skull was a combat knife. It had been thrown with such force that only the hilt was visible.
"Sir, are we dealing with a Tyrant? A Hunter?"
[Negative,] the voice replied. [Hold position.]
Henderson stood up, looking at the Echo team leader's body—the one stripped to its underwear.
"Sir, one of the hostiles... he's missing his gear. Uniform, boots, tactical belt. The subject took them."
The forest went silent again, save for the buzzing of flies beginning to land on the red grass.
---
[Meanwhile: Far away from the Raccoon City Spencer Mansion – Control Room]
Dr. Alexander White stood before a wall of high-definition monitors, his hands clasped behind his back. The blue light of the screens reflected in his rimless glasses, hiding the glint of obsession in his eyes.
He watched the live feed from Henderson's camera.
"Magnificent," Dr. White whispered.
"Sir?" The technician next to him looked up, disturbed. "They slaughtered a whole squad."
"Look at the data, you fool," White snapped, pointing at the screen. "Look at the kill efficiency."
He tapped a key, freezing the frame on the soldier with the knife in his skull.
"Zombies do not use tools," White lectured, his voice rising with excitement. "Hunters operate on instinct. Tyrants follow programming. But this..."
He zoomed in on the knife hilt.
"Subject A-1 utilized a projectile weapon—a knife—to eliminate a fleeing target. That demonstrates tactical cognition. Geometry. Physics. Hand to Eye Coordination. And much more."
He swiped the screen to the stripped corpse.
"And here," White grinned, a predatory expression that mirrored the monster he was hunting. "He took the clothes. He realized his appearance was a liability. He realized he needed camouflage to blend into the human population. He possesses Self-Awareness and Social Mimicry."
Dr. White turned to the team of scientists behind him.
"Do you understand what this means? We haven't just created a monster. We have created a Super-Soldier. He is the perfect fusion of the T-Virus's power and human intelligence. He is the Crown Jewel of the bio-weapons program!"
He grabbed the microphone, his composure cracking under the weight of his greed.
"Henderson," White barked.
[Go ahead, Dr. White.]
"Did you find the subject?"
[Negative, sir. The trail goes cold at the ridge. He's heading South. Towards the city.]
"Useless garbage," White muttered, cutting the connection for a moment. He turned to his tactical commander. "Echo Team was incompetent. We need professionals."
"Sir," the Commander asked. "Orders?"
"Reassign the mission," White commanded, his eyes gleaming. "I want U.S.S. Alpha Team mobilized. Get HUNK on the line. If he's unavailable, send Delta and Omega squads. Their priority is Capture and Retrieval."
He paused, looking back at the bloody footage of the forest.
"And send a forensics team to the ambush site. Immediately."
"Forensics, sir?"
"I want his blood!" White shouted, slamming his fist into the console. "There's a seventy percent chance he was hit—shot at least once. He must have bled."
His eyes burned as he leaned forward. "Scour every inch of that forest. I don't care how long it takes. Find me a single drop of his DNA."
His voice dropped to a reverent whisper. "If we uncover what makes him so unique… Umbrella won't just survive. Umbrella will rule the next millennia."
[Sir,] Henderson's voice came back over the line. [What about us?]
"You are done in the forest, come back," White ordered coldly. "Your new objective is the Hive. Enter the mansion. Secure the laboratory entrance and clear the Hive. Nothing comes out."
[Roger that.]
Dr. White turned away from the screen. He walked over to the main map of Raccoon City.
Red warning lights were blinking in the sewer sectors. The Red Queen's report on the rat infection vector was flashing on his datapad.
[ INFECTION RATE: EXPONENTIAL ]
[ CONTAINMENT BREACH: IMMINENT ]
"It's not too late for the sewers," White muttered.
He picked up a secure red phone—the direct line to Umbrella Headquarters.
---
Location: Far away from the Raccoon City Spencer Mansion – Control Room
Time: 07:22 AM.
The underground control center, located deep beneath the Raccoon City outskirts in a facility separate from the compromised Hive right below the Spencer Mansion, hummed with the sound of high-speed cooling fans and panicked typing. This was the "Overwatch" deck—a hardened bunker designed to monitor Umbrella's subterranean assets.
Dr. Alexander White stood before the primary display wall, a massive expanse of reinforced glass and OLED panels that currently displayed the grim geography of Raccoon City. He stood with his hands clasped behind the small of his back, his posture rigid, his pristine white lab coat reflecting the harsh blue light of the monitors.
To his left and right, technicians in grey jumpsuits scrambled, shouting data points back and forth, their voices edged with hysteria. But White tuned them out. He only cared about the data. And the data was catastrophic.
On the main map, the sewer sectors—typically marked in calm, flowing blue—were blinking with angry, pulsating red warning lights.
[ BIO-HAZARD WARNING: SECTOR 7, 8, 9 ]
[ VECTOR ANALYSIS: RATTUS NORVEGICUS ]
[ INFECTION RATE: EXPONENTIAL ]
"Report," White said, his voice cutting through the chaotic noise of the room like a scalpel. He didn't shout. He didn't need to.
The holographic projector in the center of the command pit whirred to life. The Red Queen's avatar appeared. She looked different here than she did in the Hive—crisper, less distorted, running on the dedicated backup servers of the Overwatch Nest facility.
"The containment failure in the Hive has cascaded," the Red Queen's synthesized voice announced, devoid of emotion. "The Subject known as 'Apex-1'—eliminated a significant number of infected personnel within the facility. However, his method of execution... was untidy."
"He left the mummified bodies," White deduced, staring at the blinking red lights.
"Correct. He seems to drained them of vital essence but left the desiccated, viral-laden husks behind. The local vermin population—specifically the sewer rats—have consumed the remains. They have become primary carriers."
The map zoomed in. Streams of red light moved from the underground sewers, spreading outward like the roots of a poisonous tree, reaching up into the drainage pipes of residential homes, restaurants, and the city streets.
[ CONTAINMENT BREACH: IMMINENT ]
"The rats are moving to the surface," White muttered, adjusting his rimless glasses. "It's a mathematical certainty. Within days, the domestic pets will be infected. By the fourth or fifth morning, the human population if not sooner."
He turned away from the map, walking toward the hologram.
"Red Queen," White commanded. "I need a full inventory of the biological assets in the Hive. When the Electric Charge was triggered by the intrusion team... when you were rebooting... the security grid was down."
"For approximately one thousand and two hundred seconds," the Red Queen confirmed. "The magnetic locks on the lower containment cells disengaged."
White's jaw tightened. "What got out?"
The Red Queen's eyes flashed with scrolling data streams.
"The Hive housed a collection of thirty experimental Bio-Organic Weapons in the Zoological Sector. These included Animal-based and Insect-based prototypes designed for field mobility testing."
"During the blackout window, twenty of the thirty specimens escaped their holding cells. They accessed the waste disposal chutes and have entered the Raccoon City sewer network."
White pinched the bridge of his nose. "Specifics."
"Subject Y-13 through Y-18: Web Spinners. Giant arachnid mutations. Status: Loose in the sewers."
"Subject S-4 through S-9: Adders. Viral-enhanced vipers. Status: Loose in the waterways."
"Subject W-2: Giant Moth prototype. Status: Nesting in the ventilation shafts."
White waved his hand dismissively. "Insects and snakes are manageable. They are local threats. I want to know about the hunter-killers. The heavy assets."
He stepped closer to the hologram, his shadow falling over the digital girl.
"Talk to me about the MA-121 Hunters. Talk to me about the Chimeras. And the Lickers."
The Red Queen paused for a microsecond, cross-referencing the facility sensors.
"The Hunter Alpha units—six specimens total—were housed in reinforced cryo-stasis in Sector 5. Due to the high-risk nature of these assets, my secondary backup protocols utilize a mechanical gravity-lock, not a magnetic one. When the power died, the gravity-locks held. The Hunters remain in stasis."
White let out a breath he didn't know he was holding. "Good. If six Hunters were loose in the city right now, we wouldn't have a quarantine; we'd have a war zone."
"The two Chimera hybrids," the Red Queen continued, "remained in the ventilation shafts of the Hive. They did yet to exit the facility."
"Regarding the Lickers..."
The hologram shifted, showing a list of ten subjects.
"Ten subjects were active in the Hive. Subjects 001 through 010. During the incident, nine of them were contained by the emergency bulkhead seals I initiated prior to the Electric Charge blast. They are trapped within the Hive Sewers for now."